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Comment by alach11 | Hacker News Reader

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alach11·

Isn't a large user base and the data collected from those users a moat of sorts?

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A moat is when you have something other's can't easily get.

Every MAG 7 / FAANG company already has more users and more data...

That's not a moat.

That's traction.

That's not X.

That's Y.

Been a bit out of the loop.

What's wrong with using very short sentences like 'That's not X. That's Y.'?

Commonly used phrase by LLMs. Gives people slop vibes these days.

"It's not X, it's Y" is a good way to illustrate a point. Same goes for many other common LLM phrases. It's used because it's effective.

Huh. I associate it with LinkedIn slop, which is probably 100% ai nowadays but they certainly didn't wait for llms.

They don't have the same quality and kind of data. For example, Claude Code might have general conversation flow data for implementing feature X, but Cursor has users individual editing actions AND the chat flow. Which line did the user manually edit after the agent did it's thing? What's the commit message (if done manually)? Stuff like that is worth it's weight in gold.

Honestly the data itself is probably worth heaps even in the company itself collapses. Early attention engineering when humans were still in the loop!!!

> Early attention engineering when humans were still in the loop

Exactly. Cursor was the first product used by tons of devs on real codebases. Just the signal "acceptance rate" is huge and can't be easily captured w/ synthetic data.

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